Accessible Yellow Cab Victory in New York City was Decades in the Making

On August 29^th, United Spinal Association and fellow plaintiffs scored a long-overdue victory in the Southern District of New York. Judge George Daniels ruled that the city must honor its 2013 settlement to make 50% of its Yellow Cab fleet accessible.

"It's been a long time coming, given that the settlement was over 10 years ago," says United Spinal Association General Counsel James Weisman. Jim was instrumental in writing the transportation section of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which underpins the settlement. "Finally, New York City is well on its way to complete access."

New York City flouted a 2023 extension to fulfill the commitments imposed by the settlement. This year, the city asked the court to entirely release it from the settlement terms. In response to these maneuvers, Judge George Daniels ruled that all new Yellow Cabs in New York City must be accessible until the original settlement terms are met. Currently, only 35% of the city's cabs are accessible.

The 2013 settlement and Judge Daniels' recent ruling are landmarks decades in the making. Years of successful grassroots advocacy around disability rights consolidated a core of savvy activists and skilled civil rights attorneys who could push into the final frontier of accessible transportation for New Yorkers. A sympathetic Judge Daniels-who once compared making taxis accessible to Jackie Robinson eliminating Jim Crow in baseball-certainly didn't hurt.

Courtesy Disabled In Action

The Taxis For All Campaign

In 1996, New York City advocates came together to form the Taxis For All Campaign, which included United Spinal Association (Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association at the time). Disability Rights Hall of Famer Terry Moakley initially represented United Spinal.

Taxis For All maintained pressure on local government both on the street and in the courtroom. The campaign's trajectory shows that winning rights and inclusion is not a simple incremental or linear process. It can come in waves-tidal waves.

There were barely over two dozen accessible cabs in the city during a 2004 "roll-in" protest in front of Pennsylvania Station. By 2011-the year Taxis For All's constituent organizations filed the ADA class action lawsuit that would be settled in 2013-New York politicians still considered a couple of hundred accessible Yellow Cabs an adequate improvement.

Much has changed since 2013, in both the disability rights landscape and the taxi industry. The arrival of rideshares presented a new challenge and a novel adversary for the taxi industry, which startups like Uber decimated. It gave opponents of accessible Yellow Cabs an alibi. The taxi industry could blame the disability community's insistence on accessibility for its commercial failures, muddying the policy questions at stake and avoiding what has since become an existential problem.

"New Yorkers know that the reason the Yellow Cab industry is in trouble is not people with disabilities and their accessibility requirements," says Jim. "The Taxi and Limousine Commission did not protect the industry from Uber-type services."

Austerity has also transformed public transportation and created additional urgency around creating an accessible taxi fleet. Interborough bus service has been slashed, placing enormously increased demands on paratransit. Accessible taxis would allow for spontaneous travel and alleviate the burden on paratransit and the city's universally accessible buses.

Organizing and Exercising Our Rights

What New York-based advocates have accomplished should not and must not be unique to their city's circumstances. Taxis are regulated on the local level. Advocates can appeal to municipal governments and compel them to do the right thing.

The transportation needs of the disability community do not change based on locality-they are shared and universal. The ultimate goal is independence and personal autonomy, and the more independent people with disabilities are, the more prosperous entire communities become.

The lesson here is simple, if not always straightforward, as the New York case shows. Organize expansive coalitions of people with disabilities. Approach the local taxi regulator: City Councils, mayors, or county legislators. Make this common social need a political issue. United Spinal Association's Accessible Transportation Working Group is a good place to start for advocates wanting to learn from the disability movement's history and make history themselves.

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